Connie was outraged. ‘I was an escort, not a prostitute!’
‘A classy, peroxide blonde escort in crotchless knickers, singing “boo boo be do” up against an alley wall?’ said Julia. ‘You were a prostitute, Connie, darling. And I was a drug-addled GP — but look at us now. Look at us now! Thousands of tourists traipsed through the grounds of The Grange listening to lies and exaggerations. We’re legends already — imagine if they knew the truth!’
‘Twenty-four years,’ Angela reflected. ‘Twenty-four years of pandering to Ester in fear of our freedom — of waiting for poor Norma to die. You’re right, Julia. Just look at us now!’ Then she whispered, ‘Do you want to see it?’
The spare bedroom was locked from the outside. Inside, it was filled with all twenty-five of the seats from the coach Rob had bought from the auction two weeks earlier. The backs of the seats leant against one wall and the cushions leant against the opposite wall. In the far corner was a sheeted mound. Angela removed the sheet to reveal dozens and dozens of strong green garden waste bags.
Angela carefully untied the nearest bag, unrolled the top and opened it to expose the contents — £20 notes and £50 notes, thrown together with all the care and attention of raked leaves. These notes were ‘used’ in the first place; now, they looked downright tatty. But to the women, they were breathtakingly beautiful.
This garden waste bag, along with the other forty-odd others, held their long-awaited, carefully nurtured dreams. Dreams that could have begun twenty-four years ago, had Ester not shot Dolly Rawlins dead in front of four police officers.
But now... Now it really was their time.
Chapter 21
The squad room was buzzing. Ridley wasn’t late — he was never late. He was with Superintendent Raeburn, waiting to find out if they had been given their ‘Consent to Exhume’ from the coroner.
A low hum filled the room as DC Morgan took bets. An old fossil of a man, Morgan lived in the corner of the squad room, with his own mini fridge tucked away under his desk. He was allowed this because it contained his insulin; but it also contained cans of Coke and bars of chocolate. Morgan walked that fine line between hypo and hyper — and he didn’t give a shit. He was also the squad room bookie.
Morgan had a book on who would get the sergeant’s job: Jack, Anik or an unknown quantity from outside. He had a book on which senior officer would suffer the next heart attack. And he had a book on the exhumation. He was certain that Raeburn would be refused the exhumation for ‘financial reasons’, but then he was one of the few coppers still working who had been at the funeral back in August 1984. He remembered watching Dolly Rawlins bury some bloody stranger. And he knew Raeburn would be secretly praying for a refusal from the coroner, so they could all just let sleeping dogs lie.
When Ridley finally arrived, he had good news for Morgan’s bet.
‘Currently, there’s not sufficient justification for the spend required to exhume the grave,’ Ridley said in a monotone. It was hard to tell whether he was pleased or frustrated by this. ‘On a different note,’ he went on, ‘Barry Cooper has been spotted in Essex. He’s disappeared from his digs, but the local force are tracking him down. Jack, a DS Mary Fleming is going to contact you with some details.’
With a wave of his hand, he disappeared into his office to answer the phone.
Jack fired up his computer and opened a message from DS Fleming of Essex Police. Laura stood behind him and, in a whisper, she read the screen out loud, which meant that Jack had to read at a slow pace as well. She leant her hand on the desk by the side of his keyboard and, as her breathy, whispered reading warmed the back of his neck, Jack thought about making love to Maggie in the spare bedroom. He started reviewing the number of rooms they’d made love in and realised that, since moving to London and since working such opposing shifts, they’d not been anywhere near as adventurous as they used to be. Kitchen? — no. Lounge? — yes. Bathroom? — no. Outdoors? — no. Car? — no. Work?
He smiled as he recalled delivering a pizza to Maggie at the hospital during a night shift. It had been one o’clock; he’d had a particularly boring day at work and had nipped out for a pint or five on his way home. He’d ended up at a pizza place close to the hospital, and had popped in for the company. Maggie had had an arduous shift up until that point, so was lying down in the on-call room when Jack arrived. She’d asked him to hold her and he knew that she must have lost a patient. He held her as tightly as he could, nuzzled his cheek into hers and stroked her hair. Within seconds, they’d forgotten where they were and had made love in the creaky single bed.
Jack was brought crashing back down to earth by Laura leaning even further forward so that she could track the words on the screen with her finger.
‘Fucking hell, Jack, look. Cooper’s army record says he was a sapper! A combat engineer whose duties included breaching fortifications and demolition. He knew his way round explosives. He would have known exactly how to blow a section of train track and leave the carriage intact.’
Just then, Ridley stepped from his office.
‘That was DI Prescott,’ he called across the room. ‘The demolition crew at Rose Cottage have found something.’
The heavy iron coal chute door had once been positioned above the kitchen at Rose Cottage. It had blown off at some point during the fire and landed in the front garden, so it had lain there unrecognised. It was only when a demolition crew, heavily supervised by officers from Thames Valley Police, were taking the cottage down brick by brick that the tunnel from the chute door down into the kitchen had been revealed.
Prescott, Ridley and Jack stood in the doorway of what used to be the kitchen.
‘That far wall, behind the Aga, didn’t come down in the fire,’ Prescott explained. ‘Apparently it was smashed down beforehand. That back wall used to have a coal door in it, which had been shoddily bricked up at some point. So the bottom end of the chute was bricked over, but the top end was still accessible from the front garden. Very dangerous apparently. Anyway, in the crumbling brickwork halfway down the old chute, one of the demolition guys found these.’
Prescott had been building to this. With an air of triumph, he handed Ridley a small, clear evidence bag containing several partly charred, crushed and ripped pieces of paper. It was perfectly clear that they were — or had been — banknotes. And along with the notes was half an old money band off a bundle of £20 notes, marked with ‘£1,000’.
‘There’s easily enough room in the chute for the twenty-seven million taken in the train robbery,’ Prescott continued. ‘But once the cash was in, there was no way to get it out—’
‘Without smashing down the wall.’ Ridley ended Prescott’s sentence.
For a big man, Prescott was very animated when he was excited.
‘Those robbers... balls of steel! Fancy shoving twenty-seven million of stolen cash into the wall of a copper’s house! And they were cool enough to play the long game right from the start, because they’d have known they couldn’t get the money back without taking Norma’s kitchen wall down...’
He moved outside so that he could smoke, and Ridley went with him, followed by Jack, still holding the evidence bag of ruined money.
He listened to them as the two older men discussed theories, questioning and speculating, ruling things in or out as they chatted. The gang didn’t go for the money while Norma was alive, so she probably wasn’t involved. But how did they know the coal chute was there? Do all these cottages have them and, if so, is that common knowledge? And Mike...? It looked like he was the ringleader, with Barry as his right-hand man. But on the night they came back for the money — something went very, very wrong.